Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Eleventh sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Hannah Bardell(9 years, 2 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Emily Thornberry
This was largely a probing new clause, and I am grateful to the Minister for her response. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
Clause, by leave, withdrawn.
New Clause 10
Changes to age of eligible claimants of housing benefit
‘(1) The Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992 is amended as follows.
(2) After section 130(1) insert—
“(1A) The Secretary of State shall not make provision about eligibility for housing benefit in respect of the age of a claimant except by primary legislation.”.’—(Hannah Bardell.)
This New Clause aims to ensure that any changes to the age of eligible claimants for housing benefit must be made by primary legislation rather than regulation. The Government intends to withdraw entitlement to housing benefit from 18-21 year olds and it is understood this change would be enacted by regulation.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Hannah Bardell
Indeed; what can I say?
The SNP fully supports the intention behind Labour’s new clause, and we seek to prevent any young person from being locked out of the housing system due to age. We heard our youngest Member of Parliament, my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black), speak passionately in her maiden speech about the fact that she would be the only 18 to 21-year-old in the UK who would be supported in housing under the Conservative Government’s proposals. We have already said that we will support Labour’s new clause 10, because we share the concerns of the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury.
The SNP is concerned that the Government’s intention to remove young people’s access to support with their housing costs could lead to an increase in youth homelessness. According to Crisis, youth homelessness is already on the rise, with 8% of 16 to 24-year-olds recently reported as homeless. In four years, the number of young people sleeping rough in London has more than doubled. In a written answer on 14 September the Government confirmed they would restrict 18 to 21-year-olds from access to housing benefit. Their rationale, which we believe is deeply flawed, was cited as a wish not to allow young people to slip into a lifetime of benefits. The Government may not realise that it is not simply a matter of people deciding to have to rely on housing benefit to keep a roof over their head; many young people are not able to live at home with their parents for a variety of reasons. The fact that the Government are already squeezing the pockets of working families and families with more children will make it even harder for parents to afford to keep their children at home for longer.
Of the 19,000 18 to 21-year-olds who will be affected by the change, 60% are in social housing, all of whom will have been subjected to the stringent eligibility test and only deemed a priority by the local authority because they are in need. The remainder of those eligible for help live in the private rented sector and receive the shared accommodation rate—the lowest rung of housing benefit, according to Shelter, barely enough to cover a room at the bottom end of the market.
We have seen the increase in housing costs across the UK, which has locked out this sector of society. That is frankly wrong. The Government have failed young people by failing to provide economic opportunities and stability in the workforce. Growing numbers of talented young people are left unemployed. The Minister cannot simply say, “Stay at home, and your parents will look after you”, because that is regressive and smacks of a lack of vision. Many young people cannot live at home and housing benefit is the only thing that stands between them and homelessness. Between 2010 and 2014 Crisis helped to create 8,120 tenancies in the private rented sector for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, with support from the Department for Communities and Local Government.
The SNP believes it is unfair to restrict entitlement to a benefit based solely on age rather than on evidential grounds. We support Labour’s wish for a blanket ban on the Government restricting entitlement based on age, but as the answer to a written question on 14 September confirmed, it looks likely that the Tories are intent on locking young people out of this lifeline. That is why we have tabled new clause 12, which would provide restrictions related to vulnerable people who may be impacted. I recognise that the Government have said that they will bring forward exemptions for particularly vulnerable young people, but the full details of that proposal are not in the Bill. We tabled the new clause to ensure that young people in the circumstances that I have described are protected.
Emily Thornberry
Does the hon. Lady agree with me that it is very important to look closely at what the Government say counts as vulnerable? One can imagine them saying that they are going to look after vulnerable youngsters, but their definition will be restricted. For example, they may include young people leaving care but not anyone else. We need to be careful, because Opposition Members’ definition of vulnerability may be different from what Ministers are trying to get away with.
Hannah Bardell
The hon. Lady must have read my mind. I was just coming on to the point about care leavers and those who have experienced violence or abuse. As the hon. Lady says, the categorisation of those who are vulnerable must be a unified approach. We must be in agreement on that throughout the House. Some young people may be unable to live with their parents because of relationship breakdown—for example, if they have been thrown out because of family circumstances such as a parent remarrying—or because of their own lifestyle choices or sexuality, but they might find that difficult to prove. Many young people who have found themselves homeless are currently supported into accommodation funded by housing benefit, either by a local authority or by a homelessness organisation. Without that support, those vulnerable groups will be homeless and unable to meet housing costs. Housing benefit helps those people live independently when living at home is no longer an option, and removing it could leave people choosing between returning to a destructive family home or the street.
Accepting the new clause would at least show that the Government were serious about their commitment to protect the most vulnerable, which we must have within the law. I look forward to hearing from the Minister, and I urge hon. Members to support our new clause 12 as well as Labour’s new clause 10, to ensure that vulnerable young people can access housing support to keep them off the streets.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
As everyone always says, it is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter.
Emily Thornberry
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. There are many arguments against the tax credit cuts, and although it is tempting to rehearse all of them this morning, another debate is going on elsewhere. Essentially, I cut down a long speech to a short one to make the main points.
I was talking about the policy being a failure in moral terms, as my hon. Friend illustrates well. The focus today might be down in the Chamber, but members of this Committee have the real power. They have in our hands the power to do the right thing and to put the interests of working families in their constituencies ahead of the interests of their party. They have in their hands the power to put the interests of children in some of the poorest working families first, remembering that, even as things stand, two thirds of children in poverty have a parent in work. How much worse will it be after they have suffered the cuts to tax credits?
I am sure that Conservative Members who have an interest in this field are, deep down, genuinely and gravely concerned. When we put the new clause to the vote and when their Whip holds up the piece of paper saying no, will they look aside, think about the thousands of their constituents who will be so greatly affected by the Bill and vote with their conscience, vote the right way, and stop this now?
Hannah Bardell
The hon. Lady has made a powerful speech. I will not drag out my comments on a painful and frankly despicable assault on our society. Much has been said about tax credits and I would like to give a bit of a Scottish flavour to the debate.
Since the election campaign and throughout this Parliament, the SNP has opposed the Bill in its entirety and the cuts to child tax credits in particular. It is important to highlight the findings of the IFS, that it was “arithmetically impossible” for families to do better with the limited increase in the living wage. We are talking about an attack on low-income families and vulnerable working families. In Scotland more than 500,000 children live in families that rely on tax credits to make ends meet; 350,000 of those children will feel the impact of the cuts as much needed tax credits are stripped away from more than 200,000 low-income families.
The austerity measures proposed by the Conservative Government are disproportionately harming the poorest and most vulnerable households while giving tax breaks to the better-off, thus increasing inequality, not closing the gap. Much has been said about families claiming benefits and families in work as if they were different people, different sections of society, but the reality is that the majority of people who will be affected by the provisions of the Bill are families in work.
The changes are regressive; they take proportionately more from low-income households and give to the richer ones. Planned cuts to tax credits increase the burden on the working poor and the children living in such households. The IFS has found that 63% of children living in poverty are in working households—I repeat: 63% of children living in poverty are in working households. The increase in the minimum wage for people aged 25 and over, which has been wrongly branded a living wage, is nowhere near enough to offset the cuts. The changes run contrary to the Government’s own policy of making work pay and they weaken the incentives to work, because the impact of cuts will fall disproportionately on low-income working families. This is not war on poverty; this is war on the poor.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Ninth sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Hannah Bardell(9 years, 2 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
I beg to move amendment 19, in clause 16, page 15, line 25, at end insert—
‘(7A) The waiting period before a person can apply for a loan under this section shall be 13 weeks.”
To require that the waiting period before an application for a loan for mortgage interest can be made is 13 weeks.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen, ill or not.
Housing costs are never far away from our discussions in this Committee, and the clause brings the subject back into focus in a new and unexpected way. It is not at all clear to me what the Government are trying to achieve with this strange proposal. Support for mortgage interest—SMI—is a benefit that has been in existence in some form or another since 1948. It is the same age as the welfare state and the national health service and is paid exclusively to those on the lowest incomes. It is an important part of the social safety net, the entire principle of which is undermined when we start talking about replacing benefits with loans, which is what the proposal would do.
We have tabled mostly probing amendments to clauses 16 to 18. We do not believe that interest-bearing loans have a place in the social security system at all, but we have sought to highlight some of the most serious flaws in the proposal in the hope that the Government might reassure us that the consequences of the changes have been adequately thought through because, at first blush, it seems to us that they have not.
Towards the end of Tuesday’s sitting, we began to air some of the arguments about waiting periods. The Government made clear their intention to fix the waiting period for SMI loans at 39 weeks, which is three times its current level. That is without a doubt a substantial change. The waiting period was set at 13 weeks in 2008 when the global financial crisis prompted the then Labour Government to shorten the waiting period as part of a range of measures intended to prevent homeowners from going into arrears and facing repossession of their homes.
A research report published by the Department for Work and Pensions in 2011—I recommend the Minister reads it because it is very interesting and enlightening—says that the measures were successful. It stated that the changes
“resulted in more people being assisted, more fully and sooner. Borrowers accrued lower levels of arrears or none at all”
and
“lenders have been more willing to forbear and not seek possession.”
The report was published in 2011 and can be found on the Government’s DWP website.
Reversing the process by reverting to a 39-week waiting period is counterintuitive and likely to be counterproductive. It seems likely to increase the probability of homeowners facing repossession and homelessness when they fall on hard times. If the measure is about saving money, making things more difficult for people who find themselves falling on hard times when trying to buy their home and more likely that repossession will happen earlier is counterintuitive because of the costs to us all to look after the people whose homes have been repossessed. As we discussed on Tuesday, I was disappointed that there was no mention of that in the latest Government impact assessment.
The Government have not been able to provide any reassurance that there is a robust evidence base or, indeed, any evidence base at all for the contention that the charge will not risk an increase in homelessness. The best that the Minister could do on Tuesday was to tell us:
“The Council of Mortgage Lenders has not said that the 39-week wait will drive repossessions. That is an eminently respected organisation, and it would have said if it felt that was the case.”––[Official Report, Welfare Reform and Work Public Bill Committee, 12 October 2015; c. 360.]
I was interested and frankly surprised to hear that, and thought perhaps I had misheard it. I gave the Minister the benefit of the doubt at the time, but I am afraid I do not now. I wondered if the Council of Mortgage Lenders had looked into this in a bit more depth than the Government, so I went back and looked over its submission to the Committee. Imagine my surprise when I found that the view it had expressed on the waiting period was the exact opposite of what the Minister told us! For the sake of clarity, I will quote the submission at length, because it is a very helpful document:
“If the waiting time is extended, as planned, we believe that it will result in more cases of repossession as lenders will not be able to allow their customers to continue to accrue mortgage arrears over this period especially where the customer is unable to make any payment. Lenders already have to carefully balance allowing a person to remain in their home while not allowing their financial position to worsen. Extending the waiting time will only cause additional consumer detriment.”
There we are. The council is against it. The one piece of evidence that the Minister was able to cite in support of extending the waiting period turns out to be nothing of the kind.
The Government have to do better than that. In order to persuade Members on the Opposition Benches, the Government ought to make an effort to produce some evidence or opinion from someone apart from Government Ministers that shows that the proposal is a good idea, and that extending the waiting period for mortgage lenders to get repayment will not mean an increase in homelessness. That, I appreciate, is an uphill task, but it is one they have set themselves.
I appreciate that I am a cracked record on this, but we must go beyond the rhetoric and look at evidence. Social policy should be based on evidence, and I will be interested to hear whether there is any evidence to show that extending the period from 13 weeks to 39 weeks, as the Government want, will actually help anybody.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Owen. The Scottish National party supports the intentions behind Labour’s amendment 19, because access to support must be available within 13 weeks and not the proposed 39 weeks.
According to Shelter, around £300 million per annum in SMI is “small” in terms of welfare spending, but it is very important:
“It covers the interest payments for around 200,000 home owners on their mortgages, meaning that they are less likely to be forced into having their home repossessed and, ultimately, to end up homeless.”
Shelter also says that SMI has
“tight eligibility criteria and is restricted to very low income households who are out of work, pensioners or sick or disabled. In fact, the overwhelming majority of recipients of SMI either qualify through pension credit or employment and support allowance.”
They are already some of the most vulnerable benefit claimants, so adding a further burden by turning the benefit into a loan is essentially giving with one hand and taking away with the other. We do not support the Government’s attack on the weakest by forcing more and more vulnerable people to take on the added burden of debt just to get out of hard times. How can we define that as welfare?
Amendment 19 would ensure a waiting period for applications by eligible claimants for support with mortgage interest of 13 weeks. That would offer protection against the Government increasing the waiting period, as they have done with statutory instrument No. 1647, which will increase the waiting period to 39 weeks from 1 April 2016. The explanatory memorandum to the instrument states:
“The provisions in this instrument introduce a 39 week waiting period for all working age claimants who are required to serve a waiting period before housing costs, including payment of eligible mortgage interest, can be paid.”
We do not want yet more financial pressure on benefit claimants due to having to wait more than half a year to receive financial help with their mortgage interest payments, let alone the added pressure of that financial help pushing them into further long-term debt when that benefit is turned into a loan. Has the Minister had discussions with the Scottish Government on the implications of that change from support to loan, which will impact the people of Scotland by pushing them into further debt? I would be grateful for information on that.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Shailesh Vara)
It is a pleasure, Mr Owen, to serve under your chairmanship. First, may I clarify one point concerning the Council of Mortgage Lenders? The other day, I spoke in good faith and on the basis of the many regular meetings that we have with the CML during which the issue has not been raised at all. Indeed, Paul Smee, its director general, did not raise the issue when he was in a meeting with my ministerial colleague, the noble Lord Freud, when they met in early September. Although the CML has definitely said that it believes that the 39-week waiting period will drive repossessions, they are unable to quantify numbers of repossessions. We will continue to work with the CML to assess any such impact in terms of repossessions but we do not believe that these will be significant.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Seventh sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Hannah Bardell(9 years, 2 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
I beg to move amendment 44, in clause 11, page 12, line 39, leave out “2017” and insert “2022”.
This amendment would see current arrangements for child tax credit remaining in place for children born before 6 April 2022.
I hope Committee members have all had an enjoyable recess and a successful conference. Unfortunately, the Scottish National party has to juggle a week of Bill Committees and conference, so the week will no doubt be a busy one for us.
From the outset I want to make it clear that the SNP wholeheartedly condemns the intentions behind the clause, which will exclude many of the poorest children in society from the support of our social security system, against the very principles on which that system was set up. The two-child policy, which has been much discussed, will affect more than 872,000 families who receive support for third and subsequent children. I cannot understand how anyone in Committee could say that that was fair, just or necessary.
The stark reality is that the Government’s national child poverty strategy recognises that the risk of poverty is much more significant in larger families than in smaller ones. A third of the children living in poverty live in families with three or more children. Perhaps it is for that reason that the Government are seeking to airbrush child poverty from the statute books. It is easy for the Government to come in with a clean page, to spout theories without evidence and to claim that reducing financial support to only two children will make poorer families rethink their financial choices, but that is based on the falsehood that all children are planned and that it is possible to plan financially for children. As I am sure we all know, that is not possible.
What if someone’s second pregnancy turns out to be twins, or even triplets? We still have no real clarity on how multiple births will be treated. Will the Minister concede that such eventualities simply cannot be planned for? Perhaps he needs a biology lesson. Are we telling families to stop having children just in case? The scenarios are not that simple.
I have raised many times in Committee and on the Floor of the House, as have my SNP colleagues, the very sensitive issue of children resulting from rape and the even more insensitive plan of the Minister and the Government to make women justify their children in front of a caseworker from the Department for Work and Pensions. Many organisations have stated clearly that their staff have to train for a considerable amount of time to support women who have been raped, so I cannot understand how the Government’s proposed system and policy will work.
I therefore ask, clearly and specifically, for the Minister to keep in place the existing arrangements for children born before 2022 and to tell the Committee, before we vote on the amendment, exactly what his Department’s plans are for that. We all have to deal with constituency cases, but I am interested to know how any Government Members would deal with a woman coming to them who cannot seek benefit because she has been raped and therefore has to justify herself to the DWP. Even in evidence to the Committee, stakeholders described the policy as “unpalatable”. Does it simply show, at the height of Tory insensitivity, how out of touch the party is with reality? My view and that of my colleagues is that the Government have simply not thought things through.
When the Minister responds, will he tell me just how a woman would prove that her child was a result of rape? We all know the difficulties involved in securing a criminal conviction in that respect, as well as the high burden of proof, never mind the devastating emotional impact on the victim. What exactly will be the Government’s standard? Why did the Minister, and the Conservatives generally, think it appropriate to include the issue? The policy will ultimately result in a complete abuse of rape victims’ privacy, leading to serious emotional damage of the child should he or she become aware through the social security system that they are the result of rape. Imagine someone finding that out purely because their parents seek benefits.
Let me be clear: discussing this matter is not something I do lightly, but the SNP feels, as I hope others on the Opposition side of the Committee feel, that we must speak up. Amendment 44 would kick the policy into the long grass. Even campaigners Women Against Rape have called the policy “disgusting”, saying it will have “appalling consequences”. The SNP stands firm with that position and urges the Government to remove the two-child policy from child tax credit and universal credit provisions to ensure that no victim or child should go through the torment associated with justifying a third child, given the horrific crime inflicted on them.
Given the current economic climate, families simply cannot plan for a third child, or subsequent children. What if their first or second child was the result of rape, and they went on to have further children, but their economic circumstances changed? The Government’s failure to secure a strong, thriving economy with stable employment opportunities means that, although the members of a family may have stable and reliable jobs, there is, as we have seen, no guarantee that someone who decides to have a child will be employed for the next 18 years. To deny assistance to families who fall on hard times completely flies in the face of what the welfare system was built for.
Working people will ask why they pay their taxes when they can no longer receive support in our social security system. Will they be made to feel that their third child was a bad choice because the company they worked for made them redundant? Does the Minister have an answer for the parents of twins or other children? Could he, or any Government member of the Committee, look into a constituent’s eyes and say with a clear conscience that that constituent’s bad financial planning means they deserve no support from the Government?
The provisions in the Bill are nothing more than a move to socially engineer society into a form the Tory Government have dreamt up—one where the right to have a third child is a luxury reserved for the rich. That is not a society that I, any of my colleagues or, I believe, anybody in this country wants to live in. That is why the SNP are standing up for the poor, for hard-working folk and for children. We want to protect them when they fall on challenging times.
Child Poverty Action Group research shows that many families in receipt of tax credits are already struggling to meet their children’s most basic needs. Current levels of entitlement cover only between 73% and 85% of the cost of raising a child. Removing tax credit entitlements will only widen that gap further. Ultimately, the provision in the Bill could sink more families below the breadline, leaving children at risk of ill health and lower educational attainment.
From the heart, and using my head, I can only urge all Members to unite with the SNP today and to think of the constituents who will come to them—those with three or more children and those struggling to get more hours at work to make ends meet. Members should think of what rejecting the policy will do for those people: they will be able to look their constituents in the eye and say they did everything they could to stop the policy. If we, as parliamentarians, are here to legislate for those we represent, let us legislate properly and with our consciences. The provisions in the Bill do not make good law, so I ask Members to please think again and vote with us.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to return to the Committee, Mr Streeter.
The two-child policy—there is a list of political regimes that begins with the Vietnamese communists and the Iranian theocrats—is not going to end well. We are debating a proposal that would see the current Administration join that inauspicious rank of people who at one time or other have imposed state-sanctioned limits on the number of children a family can have. Even the ayatollahs backed away from it in recent years.
Of course, there is a caveat in the Bill that adds a layer of unpleasantness to the proceedings. The Government will impose a limit on family size that applies only to poor families. At least the other countries tried to stop all families from having more children. This Government seem to focus only on the poor. They seem to be trying to limit the number of children that the poor have.
We are not all poor always. Some of us might begin life by being quite well off and comfortable and able to make decisions. We would know we could be completely confident that we could be independent, but then things happen. That is what the social security system has always been about. I speak from personal experience. My parents were allegedly, supposedly happily married. They had three children and then one day, when I was seven and my younger brother was five and my other brother was three, my father left—he left the country and abandoned us. I remember the bailiffs came round. They were wearing bowler hats—this was the ’60s—and they threw us out of our house. We had nowhere to go and we had no money and the welfare state picked us up and gave us accommodation. They gave us a house. Nobody said, “How many children have you got? You’ve been very reckless, Mrs Thornberry, I’m sorry we can’t give you any money for the third child. Young Ben Thornberry is going to have to starve.” There was none of that thinking. It was tough, but we were looked after. Nobody looked down on my mother for having made a decision with my father to have three children. That was a long time ago, but I feel that that is the sort of Britain we ought to want to be involved in.
We ought to be able to have a Britain where we have a safety net that looks after people when they find themselves in difficult circumstances. We do not want to have a Government that tells people, “Now listen here, you look a bit rough round the edges. We don’t want you to have any more than two children. Lord knows what they will be like and you won’t even be able to look after them. Sorry, but no, that’s it.” Where will it end?
Frankly, this is an extraordinary piece of legislation. It is shockingly bad and it flies in the face of a British value of which I have always been very proud—that we look after the weakest and poorest and have a safety net. If things happen, people will not starve. We should not say, “I’m sorry, we are now in a world where people must make choices.” The third or fourth child does not make a choice to live. The third, fourth or fifth child is not to be blamed for their existence. The sixth child is not to have no shoes because of a reckless mother who cannot keep her legs crossed. It is not the sixth child’s fault that he is the sixth child. Why should he starve? How will it make a difference? What is the evidence that the Government want to put before us that will tell us that a change to the benefits system in that way will stop people having more children?
It is interesting that there is not going to be an equality impact assessment. The Government have learned their lesson. The last welfare Bill had 20 equality impact assessments, which the Opposition revelled in, as did all the people opposing that previous piece of pernicious legislation, because the assessments showed what the effect of welfare legislation would be. I may be quoting roughly—I will be corrected if I am wrong—but one of the equality impact statements produced for the previous Bill, which the Government have unfortunately not produced for this one, said that black and Asian families were three times as likely to have more than two children. It is interesting that the Government decided not to have an equality impact assessment on clause 11. Perhaps nobody will notice that the legislation affects black and Asian families that much more.
We all know whom the Bill will affect: women—black, Asian, white or whatever. Women will be adversely affected by the Bill and will struggle to work out how they are going to afford a pair of shoes that winter for the fourth child. Mr Streeter, you may be surprised to hear this, but yes, we are against this particularly nasty piece of legislation. I do not know at this point if you wish me to speak to new clauses 5 and 6.
Emily Thornberry
Yes, indeed. From speaking to people who have spent many years devoted to this sector and who have tried to make our safety net as good as it possibly can be in difficult times, the attacks are coming from so many different angles, at so many different levels and so fast, that for many of us it is very difficult to know where to start. The changes are fundamental and very frightening. We know that what will happen in two or three years’ time will become manifest, and it will become increasingly obvious that the poor have got much poorer and that people have got much more desperate. That will affect children, and those born now will be disproportionately affected.
I hope that at that point, the Government will finally realise that, because I do not think that many of those on the Government Benches are heartless, but they have not thought this through. The difficulty is that their policy is based entirely on rhetoric. That is clear from some of the lines in their manifesto that are now appearing in proposed legislation. Look at the Childcare Bill, which says very little more than what was in the manifesto. The difficulty is that if you do not make policy on the basis of evidence but on the basis of rhetoric—what sounds right and what you think will work well with your focus groups—that will not work when it comes to ruling the country.
This is yet another ill-thought-out cut and change to the most vulnerable and most hard-working families, to the families in the most difficulty. Imagine spending time bringing up a child with disabilities and the continued worry of that. Those families have enough worry in terms of their child’s welfare without worrying about why the Government are taking away yet more funding and making life that much more difficult.
Hannah Bardell
It is a pleasure to speak again, Mr Streeter. I will keep my remarks brief and start by saying that we are more than happy to support Labour’s amendments. We offer that hand of friendship across the Benches as a form of compromise.
The amendments support the same policy intentions—although not quite as strongly—as our amendments that we have already discussed, so I will not go on too much. We support the intentions of protecting those who are fostering or adopting, households with disabled children and also, as the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley mentioned, kinship carers. That is something which the SNP in the Scottish Government have done a lot on in recent years. These are some of the most vulnerable children in society. We must do everything we can to protect them. Please, Minister, you must concede that we need to protect at least some of these children from the cuts. Will you back the advice of the Social Security Advisory Commission which said that there has to be a review? Will you take that into consideration in your closing remarks?
Hannah Bardell
The hon. Lady’s points are very interesting. Does she agree that we also have to take cognisance of religious groups across the divide? In many cases, such as those of Catholics, who consciously do not use contraception—[Interruption]—these policies could well be an infringement of their human rights.
Emily Thornberry
The Minister says from a sedentary position that, in the 21st century, we should not pay attention to the Catholic view of contraception and decisions made within Catholic families. I am surprised. I say no more.
As I was saying, the Government have not provided details about what might be considered exceptional circumstances, so new clause 16 has suggested a few examples, such as multiple births, adoptions or kinship care arrangements. I recommend to the Minister an article in The Guardian today, written by Patrick Butler, about kinship adoption and related difficulties. One difficulty, among the many difficulties that people who put themselves forward to adopt children face, will be a potential cut in tax credits. If someone adopts a child who has a little brother, and the little brother then needs to go up for adoption, will that person say, “No, I can’t do it, because I can’t get the tax credits”? Are they really going to say that? Is that right? No, it is not, so will the Minister please do something about that, and will Government Members pay attention to our arguments and vote with us on new clause 16? It is entirely sensible and fleshes out the exceptional circumstances, which we think are glaring.
Those exceptional circumstances are: multiple births, adoptions, kinship care arrangements, relationship breakdowns, including, but not limited to, cases of domestic violence, and the death of a partner. The Minister says, “We are doing this in order to make sure that people make the correct choices.” I have spoken from my own personal circumstances. Frankly, my example is out of date, but unfortunately, in the last 40 or 50 years, these things have continued. People die unexpectedly and people leave unexpectedly. It is not as though someone can make a “bad choice”—in the Minister’s words—to have a third child and then take it back because their partner has died. That seems exceptionally harsh to us.
The new clause also proposes an exemption for those who become unemployed. The point here is to emphasise that, even if we accept the Government’s suggestion that families should make their family planning decisions based on the Government’s welfare reform legislation—that is a tall order in itself, although I suppose having to sit up and read the Government’s legislation on welfare reform might be some form of contraception—and even if the Government are right that people will realise welfare reform means it will be a bad idea for them to have a third child, people in work will not see that as relevant. They will make decisions because they can afford to have their children, but something may then happen, such as their becoming unemployed, and they will be hit that much harder. Therefore, even if the Government are right, which they are not, that people will make decisions on how big their family should be based on welfare reform, those people who are in work at the moment, making decisions frivolously to have four children, will find themselves in great difficulties if they suddenly become unemployed. That is unfair, as I am sure the Minister will recognise. We need to acknowledge the realities of life, particularly in the 21st century job market. People work in an insecure market. People can lose their jobs. Hopefully, they will get back into work, but it is unrealistic to expect parents to make decisions about their jobs and income with 100% certainty over an 18-year period. It is just not right. There are also abusive relationships. Women should not be expected to make decisions based on the possibility that they might become victims of domestic violence.
The new clause raises the serious issue of a couple’s penalty. Couples with more than two children will be given an incentive to separate just to continue receiving the support that they need to feed their children. That will happen. It is especially ironic that measures of child poverty are being replaced by measures of family breakdown, among other things. The Government are to measure child poverty on the basis of family breakdown, yet their social policy seems to pressure families into a form of breakdown so that they can continue to receive the benefits and tax credits that they need. The Tory party used to be the party of family and marriage. Why is its social policy dividing people? The irony is especially acute given the Secretary of State’s claim at the Conservative party conference that this Government’s reforms are
“all about making families stronger”.
Clearly, they are not.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Sixth sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Hannah Bardell(9 years, 3 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Hannah Bardell
Our amendments are intended to protect people from the Conservative Government’s dangerous blanket cut to benefits. The clause lowers the benefit cap set by the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and applies it to a large number of benefits. Our group of amendments would remove the new cap and ensure that the original cap remained for inside and outside London, recognising the significantly higher cost of living in London. Amendment 25 would remove the subsection that makes changes to the original 2012 Act, while amendments 26 and 27 would change the wording of the Bill so as to leave the benefit cap in the original Act unchanged. Amendment 38 is consequent on the other amendments.
The original benefit cap in the 2012 Act was introduced so that benefit claims could not exceed average earnings. The Government have not introduced such a rationale for the imposition of the new cap—the rates at which it is to be set are entirely arbitrary. Where did the figures come from? We have no information on that and we cannot understand the rationale. We must remember that the rates are not only numbers or bands, or digits on a piece of paper; those numbers represent a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of people in the UK.
The Government are not only blindly pushing ideologically driven cuts but applying the cuts with entirely arbitrary figures that have no justification. The families to whom the cuts will apply must have answers on where the figures have come from. I and, I am sure, many others have already had a stream of constituents coming to our surgeries to complain about cuts and sanctions that seem nonsensical and that they cannot understand.
Labour’s amendment 71 would maintain the link between the benefit cap and estimated average earnings that the original Act intended. Although we oppose the cap generally, we also oppose removing the link with average earnings and introducing an arbitrary cap, so we support the principle of that amendment. I commend it.
The utterly thoughtless way in which the Government are making the benefit changes is staggering. The breadth of social groups that will be affected and the depth to which they will be affected should make Ministers hang their heads in shame. The burden of the cuts will be felt not only across Scottish and other devolved Administrations, although we are doing our best to protect people, but throughout all parts of the United Kingdom.
The National Housing Federation estimated that under the £23,000 cap in London, families face a shortfall between benefit and rent of £27.79 per week; the weekly shortfall under a £20,000 cap ranges from £37.40 in Yorkshire and Humberside to £67.35 in the south-east, based on the current rent agreement. There is also danger that families and individuals living in temporary accommodation who, by virtue of their situation, are already deemed to be vulnerable by a local authority will no longer be able to manage rent payments and will find themselves homeless once again. We are making some of the most vulnerable in society even more vulnerable.
Some disability-related benefits are to be protected, which is welcome, but countless charities and lobbying groups have pointed out that disabled people and their carers sometimes also rely on a variety of other benefits that are being capped by the Bill. It is not enough to protect a few disability-specific benefits from the cap; the Government need to look at the bigger picture. Again, there does not seem to be any joined-up or strategic thinking behind the cap.
The effects of the cap will also be felt by those who have life-threatening or terminal illnesses and who require care. They and their carers will be subject to the cap. How can we possibly justify capping and cutting support for some of the most vulnerable and ill people in our society?. It seems nonsensical and the Scottish National party is absolutely opposed to it. Not only are the cuts detrimental to the ability of those who are sick and disabled to live independently, but the poverty and debt might lead to even more vulnerability.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. It is also an enormous pleasure to serve on this Committee, to have heard contributions such as that made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston, who is departing from her current position on the Front Bench, and to hear the passion with which she gave voice to the beating heart of the Labour party and the outrage at how the Bill is being introduced and its extraordinary justification. If anyone ever questions where the Labour party’s heart is, they just need to hear her speech from before lunch.
I wish to speak to amendment 71. According to the Book of Ecclesiastes:
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Those words have survived for thousands of years, but could almost have been written yesterday by an author scratching his head over some of the perverse measures in the Bill. I suspect that historians will one day look back on these debates and cite the benefit cap as a classic example of an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in modern politics: a solution without a problem. After all, we have had a household benefit cap for more than two years.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Fourth sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Hannah Bardell(9 years, 3 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Hannah Bardell
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his remarks. We have no problem with supporting the definition in the Opposition’s amendment, which supports the ambitious target for the UK of achieving the highest rate of employment in the G7—Oxfam made that comment just this month.
Amendment 106 requires the report on full employment to report on the quality of jobs—as the right hon. Gentleman said, we heard a lot about that in evidence to the Committee, both oral and written—and their distribution, and to give a breakdown of statistics for employees in those jobs. New clause 11 would put a duty on the Secretary of State to define job quality within six months of carrying out a public consultation on it—a public consultation is very important.
The intention behind our two measures is to ensure the quality of jobs created, so that they amount to decent work. According to Oxfam, the quality of work is central to alleviating poverty, particularly through the concept of decent work:
“‘Decent work’ includes fair pay, job security, mental health, recognition of overtime, work-life balance, job satisfaction and autonomy, safety, achievable work, skills development, and effective management.”
My apologies; that is not Oxfam but Unison—I would not want to misquote anyone.
It is deeply troubling that, increasingly, available jobs are not always reliable and therefore are not a long-lasting route out of poverty. As I mentioned earlier, the number and rise of zero-hours contracts, low-paid jobs with insufficient working hours, insecure contracts and often poor job progression can mean many working people are still trapped in poverty. Disabled people are more likely to be unemployed or in low-paid positions regardless of their qualifications. It is therefore vital that we measure where jobs are going and their quality to ensure we can identify gaps in employment and work to create quality full employment for everyone, to echo recent comments by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
It is of further concern to us that in a 2014 report, “Pay progression: Understanding the Barriers for the Lowest Paid”, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reported that, as many who have contributed to our evidence sessions have said, women in particular are estimated to comprise up to 64% of low-paid workers. The measures we have tabled would help us bring forward decent work measures to identify where the Government should really direct their policy efforts to achieve full employment, deliver equality and challenge barriers at work, in order to lift the poorest out of poverty.
Unison has called for
“a commitment from the Government to encourage employers to provide decent jobs, wages and work practices”,
and has stated that that should be measured. The amendment and new clause would bring forward that vision and ensure that the Government defined their duty within six months of the Bill’s enactment. We feel strongly that having a commission to look at this issue will give us the opportunity to provide a definition. Without one, it will be hard to measure job quality. We will press the measures to a Division.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
I found the evidence on this clause very interesting. It speaks to our modern times. In the ’70s, everyone knew what full employment was. It meant five-day-a-week of nine-to-five jobs in which it was clear what someone’s role was and they had security, with a pension and a family wage. We have moved a very long way from that.
We heard earlier from the chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group that it is important to have child poverty figures that make sense in order to keep Government honest. I am concerned about the honesty behind the clause—what it really says and what it is really doing about making matters clear to the public. In 2015, we as a society want full employment, but what we see that as is not the vision of the 1940s or 1950s. It is a different type of full employment.
The reality is that a large number of people work flexibly. Many of them work flexibly out of choice, because it helps them to balance their work and family life, but many more work flexibly out of the choice of their employer. The increasing and unfair demand for people—particularly the young—to work on zero-hours contracts undermines our sense of security, of wellbeing and of having a place. Part of being in employment is that we feel we have a role. If someone is employed on a zero-hours contract, they are a beggar; they are there at the sufferance of their employer. They could be called to work any hours or no hours, and yet they have been bought.
Someone in “full employment” could be working a ridiculous amount. If the Government are talking about full employment as being people in jobs, and those jobs are employment as defined by the Office for National Statistics, I imagine that someone could be working 20 hours or 20 minutes a month and still be in employment. The Minister would then happily get up and tell the country that there was full employment, when many people were working hardly any hours, did not know how many hours they would work, were working with great insecurity and were bouncing along at the bottom of the employment ladder. They might work for a few hours in an ice cream van if the sun shines. If it rains, they will not work for two weeks. They will not work in the winter, and yet in some respects they would be in full employment, at least for part of it. That is not what people imagine as full employment.
I do not know who thought of this, but let us say it was George Osborne, just to pick a name off the top of my head. Let us say he was wanting to—I don’t know—manipulate things, make political points and try to fool the public. I may be wrong, and I will listen with interest to what the Minister says about this, but it might be part of the red Tories agenda to appeal to the working class. They want to have someone getting up and saying, “Do you know what, guys? We’re in full employment.”
The fact is that people will be sitting at home, looking at this and knowing that their friends and family are not in what they believe to be full employment. They are not in employment that brings home a wage with which they can support themselves, let alone their families. We know that because of the rise of zero-hours contracts. We know from friends and family that there are people in employment who certainly do not earn enough money to live. We also know that because of the rise in tax credits. The Government are dealing with the cost of tax credits not by ensuring that people no longer need to rely on them because they are in what I define as full employment, but by starving the third child. That does not seem to be entirely straightforward.
For the Bill to begin with the Secretary of State getting up and telling us all that people are in full employment when we know that they are not at all seems to lay the grounds of what the Bill is really about—it is about political posturing. It is a heartless and nasty piece of legislation. It undermines the very support of the poorest and most vulnerable, and it begins by having a laugh: it says that they are going to be in full employment, when we know they will not be.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Third sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Hannah Bardell(9 years, 3 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Hannah Bardell
Q 204 Do you really, truly believe that if we have more people and children in poverty —let us not forget that the research suggests that we are going to have 200,000 children in poverty, versus 80,000 adults—the public are going to welcome that?
Dr Niemietz: Not if conditionality works properly. If it gives incentives—a carrot and stick approach—to getting back into work, why would it increase poverty? It has not done that in Wisconsin.
Julia Unwin: The evidence shows that conditionality can work for some people and the global evidence suggests that, for some people, it provides the spur back into work, but far more often it drives people into making the wrong work choice, accepting a job they cannot possibly fulfil and therefore falling back into benefits. In Wisconsin and other parts of the United States, there is clear evidence that people are coming off benefits completely but not going into work. We are concerned about what the implications of that will be, because you end up with people making short-term choices that keep them going in the short term but can cost the state very much more in the longer term. Conditionality applies to all public services and all people. There is a contract in place, and we need to understand how it works. But if the current method of sanctioning creates destitution by design, we have created a real, expensive problem for the long term.
Emily Thornberry
Q 205 The four-year freeze on working-age benefits, the limit of tax credits to two children and, in particular, the lowering of the benefit cap continue the disconnect between the amount of benefit that is paid to people because of their need and the simple sum they are given. It is not done on the basis of needing more; it seems to be that people will be given an absolute sum, and that is that. Clearly, that will have an impact on poverty and on particular groups—I wonder which groups. Is it right that the group affected most might be single parents, when it comes to child poverty?
Julia Unwin: Is it correct? Yes. Is it right? No. Single parents and disabled people in different categories will be particularly affected, but in terms of this Committee’s concerns, single parents will be affected most.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (First sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Hannah Bardell(9 years, 3 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Emily Thornberry
Q 3 But the point is that if we are not measuring unemployment further than that—I mean, should we not be measuring things such as whether people are getting the hours they want and how many of them have to rely on in-work benefits to live? Is that not a better way of measuring real full employment, as opposed to people working in a family business and not getting paid, working just an hour a week or working on a zero-hours contract? If we want real full employment, we want people to be able to live with dignity. The measures that the Government are introducing are not the sorts of measures that the public can rely on and, perhaps, can be defined as a lie.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
Can I ask a supplementary to that? Following on from Emily, as has been made clear, with the baseline for recording being only one hour in the previous week, surely it would sensible to have something in the Bill specifically about quality and decent work, and have the Government define that in the Bill. Would that be sensible?
Marcus Mason: It would be sensible to think about the large number of people who are inactive, and how you account for them and incentivise them coming into the labour market. As you know, the unemployment figure does not take those people into account, so it makes sense to supplement the unemployment figure with an employment target. Who sets that target is crucial. Is it an independent voice—an independent body of experts—or is it just the Secretary of State? Ultimately, you would probably want a set of economists, perhaps the Office for Budget Responsibility, giving an annual indication of where they think full employment is given the economic circumstances at the time, which the Secretary of State can then report against.
Emily Thornberry
Q 4 I have one more question. One aim of this Bill is to lower the level of the household benefit cap. The Government are arguing that they should cut benefits in such a way as to provide an incentive for people to go into work, but they define work as being 16 hours a week. Surely we cannot have a definition of employment from the Government in the Bill saying that it is 16 hours a week, and yet measure employment as one hour a week. Do you see the inconsistency?
Marcus Mason: Yes; to be honest, there are lots of ways that you can probably refine these figures. There are lots of people who work fewer hours than the average working week, for lots of different reasons. They do not all fall in the category of people who want to work more, although I totally accept that underemployment is a big issue and increasing numbers of people would like to work more but are underemployed. It is important to pick that up in narrative reports, but once again, we think that the headline figures should focus on the unemployment rates and probably the employment rates as well.
Emily Thornberry
Q 26 I represent a constituency that is part of a London borough which has the sixth highest child poverty figures in the whole country, and we have already been hit very hard by the benefit cap, with many families having to move out of Islington to outer London, so children are having to commute for many hours to go to school. Can you tell us what it means for children to be uprooted from their local communities at an early age, and how their education can be affected, either by changing schools or by having to travel 20 or 30 miles to get to school each morning? How might that impact on child poverty and their life chances?
Neera Sharma: We know that children who grow up in poor families do less well in terms of their education. Uprooting those children from the communities and the support they need, as you have said, has an impact on their life chances. We are concerned that families will have less income as a result of the cap, but we are also very concerned about the mechanisms for reviewing that cap, because the Bill allows the Government to review that cap without having to report to Parliament. It is really important that there is full scrutiny and that the Government do report to Parliament, and that they ask the Social Security Advisory Committee to undertake an annual review of the cap that is reported to Parliament before any decisions are made about increasing, or decreasing—as it probably will be—the cap.
Hannah Bardell
Q 27 Following on from that, the Child Poverty Commission warned in 2014 that there was no realistic hope of meeting the targets that were already set, and that was before the cuts that were proposed in this Bill. Is there not a grave risk that, if we remove those targets, we will have no way of understanding the real impact of the cuts, at a stage when we are not meeting the targets previously set?
Neera Sharma: Yes, I agree. I think that is why it is vital to keep the provisions of the Child Poverty Act as they are, because they do set targets for Government. They set measures, but they also enable a strategy to be produced that can look at how we can tackle child poverty and children’s life chances over a longer period.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Hannah Bardell(9 years, 3 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Emily Thornberry
Q 26 I appreciate that. I just wondered how much your thinking has influenced the Bill when you are here giving evidence in relation to the Bill. It is important to see it in that context.
Charlotte Pickles: Sure. We published our paper on this just after the election, so I think it would have been early June. I assume that would have been significantly after when conversations started taking place about what to do, but certainly in the conversations I have had with people, both on and off the record, most would say that there is a perverse financial incentive built into ESA as it currently exists.
Hannah Bardell
Q 27 I have a number of concerns about the kind of language and terminology that is used. First, you are saying the perception is that ESA programmes are successful and hugely ambitious. I am not sure that a 10% success rate would be deemed by me or anyone else on this side of room a success. When the number of people being sanctioned on the Work programme is twice as many as those getting employment, I would again question whether that is a success.
I put this to everyone on the panel: we are not clear about the impact that the cap has had already, although we have a lot of concerning figures, particularly about single-parent families. Before we cap people further, should we not be looking at the Work programme and having a full-scale review of it to make it more effective for people moving off ESA, before we cut their benefits?
Emily Thornberry
Q 79 But you have just accepted that there are people who will be. It is your own evidence I am picking up on. It was your evidence that said you accept there will be people who are unemployed because of their physical or mental disabilities for a number of years. Given that you recognise that, all I am asking you is: as a matter of humanity, is it not wrong to push those people on to a level of jobseeker’s allowance and expect them to live on it?
Matt Oakley: What I am saying is that there will be people in the ESA WRA group who are, under the current system, likely to be unemployed for an extremely long time. There are similarly people in the JSA group who are classed as ready for work but who will be unemployed for a very long time. I am agreeing with other people on the panel that we should stop classing people through a basic system of “ready”, “not quite ready” or “ready for work,” and start looking at tackling their barriers in a much more flexible way. That means re-targeting employment support and the very hardest to help.
Elliot Dunster: It is really important to remember that people in the work-related activity group are disabled people, and disabled people face additional barriers to get into work. There is nothing wrong with that person; they don’t need to be fixed. They just have additional barriers that they face to get back to work. That can be employers’ attitudes. That can be structural barriers where they live—perhaps the transport infrastructure is not accessible and they find it difficult.
The biggest barrier that disabled people tell us they find is a lack of flexibility in the workplace and the right jobs available. If you have an injury and have done a manual job all your life, you are probably not going to go back to that same job, and you will need a period of rehabilitation. The statistics bear that out: 10% of unemployed disabled people are unemployed after five years. That figure is only 3% for people on jobseeker’s allowance, so there is a difference and it is because of the additional barriers that disabled people face to get back to work.
To address your question about the additional funding available, we have a range of ideas that we suggested to the Committee through our written evidence. One of them, which we would like the Committee to explore, is to join up “holistically”—to use your word—across Government and to look at the Chancellor’s focus on devolution, for example, and regional growth. What can we learn from some of the youth unemployment programmes in the last Parliament? We should target some of that money at areas where there is high unemployment among disabled people, and use some of the things we already know to work—for example, small disabled people’s organisations working with disabled people intensively to find them jobs that they can stay in, progress in and build careers in. That is where we think that money should go.
Laura Cockram: Just briefly, I think it would be useful to address the issues we talked about earlier in terms of the work capability assessment and reforming it. Actually, if we are assessing people correctly to go into the right groups that is a very good use of the money that is extra there.
Hannah Bardell
Q 80 I will follow on from Emily’s points, because my question is really very similar. The numbers from the House of Commons are that we have 492,000 people on the ESA WRA group, and half of them—250,000— have very serious mental or behavioural issues. They have very different requirements and some of them will probably never work. How can we justify in any kind of humane way putting them on to a level of income that they will have no option of getting off, because they will never be able to work?
There is a bit about categorisation, and while I realise we are talking about all being in it together, and there are some very good ideas coming out, we have to look at, for example, a radical vision to provide employment support that is tailored and personal. We do not have that at the moment, as many of you have already suggested; so surely we have to look at that first, before cutting anybody’s benefits. People have to have the opportunities and the support has to be out there before we put people further into poverty.
Sophie Corlett: Absolutely we do, but I think we also have to recognise that for some of those people it does not matter how much help you provide them with, because they might not be well enough; and a cut in their benefit not only may subject them to poverty, but it may subject them to worse mental health, for which they are then punished, for not getting more of a job. So there is a responsibility not just to give people a decent amount of living, but to give people an opportunity for good health. We know that having appropriate work is good for people’s wellbeing, but actually having enough money not to be socially isolated, to be stress-free about whether you pay the rent, the heating, or put food on the table—those things are important for people’s wellbeing.
Gareth Parry: I think, if I may—it is not helpful to talk about people who will never work. That shows a culture of a lack of aspiration. Everybody should have the potential to work—